Agricultural balers typically comprise a flywheel. A flywheel is provided as a buffer between the continuous power supply of the tractor and the pulsed power consumption of the baler mechanics. Over the years, balers have become more and more powerful, meaning that larger bales can be compressed to a higher density. This requires a large amount of power to be transmitted from the tractor to the mechanics. Therefore, modern balers tend to have large and heavy flywheels.
A drawback from large and heavy flywheels is that it requires a lot of energy to accelerate the flywheel from a standing still state to a working state. Typically a flywheel rotates at about 1000 rpm (rotations per minute) in a conventional working state. The flywheel is typically connected to a PTO (power take off) of a tractor via a cardan coupling. Although the latest generation tractors might be constructed to be able to startup a heavy large flywheel, most older tractors don't. When such large and heavy flywheel is connected to a tractor that is not adapted to handle such flywheel, the tractor is stalled and the flywheel can not be started.
Suggestions have been made in the prior art to rotate a flywheel via a hydraulic system. However, such hydraulic systems are costly and complex in use.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an agricultural baler that is adapted to transmit high powers from PTO to the baler mechanics while preventing stalling of the tractor during startup.